Practicing Repertoire

Playing pieces – songs, licks, solos – is fun, but it’s extremely easy to play through a piece and either gloss over tough sections, or try to work on the whole thing at once.

For practicing repertoire, the 20 minute rule is still in effect, but the important aspect is this: you should have a passage perfect at the end of that 20 minutes. A passage can be a single measure, or a single component of a piece, such as the thumb picking of Travis picking.

If it is taking more than that, then the passage you chose to work on is too big. Cut the passage in half and work on that, making it perfect within the 20 minutes. Continue cutting in half if necessary! Provided there aren’t any fundamental motor skill challenges, you can always reduce any passage down to even two notes, perfect them, and build from there.

Most people, including me, try to do too much at once. This leads to endlessly practicing for hours on end without visible improvement, which is discouraging. Be smart, and break it down.

The next day when you come to practice, repeat the above process with the same passage. You may not notice any improvement at the start of the second day, it might feel just as bad as the first. But when you practice that passage on day two, it will take you less time to get that small section perfect. Depending on the difficulty, you may need to repeat the above process for the passage, even for a few days. But you will make progress on this section, and in doing so will acquire the tools you need to surmount the next obstacle.

Try this method out! In some ways it will feel slower, but over the not-too-long haul, you can make real progress.

The best explanation I’ve found yet about this comes from pianostreet.com:

In order to learn anything in the most efficient way, work on it with full concentration for a period of time (15 – 20 minutes is more then enough) and then forget about it until the next day. The next day repeat the same procedure for the same amount of time and again forget it until the next day. Repeat this as many days as necessary to be able to play the passage in question is such a way that you cannot get it wrong even if you try. I assure you that you will get to this point in a maximum of seven days, usually much less. This demands incredible discipline and consistency. But it works like magic.

Now consider this extreme example. You decide to practice 5 hours every day. These five hours can be divided in 12 practice sessions of 20 minutes each plus 5 minutes break in between each practice session. The worst thing you can do is this: “Today I am going to practice bars 12- 24 of piece x.”. Then you do that in each of the 12 practice sessions. For 5 hours solid. It does not work. It is a waste of time. The brilliant thing you can do is to use each of these 12 practice sessions to practice something completely different in each.

You see, it does not matter if you work on a passage for 20 minutes or for five hours. Whatever you accomplished in 20 minutes is all you are going to accomplish that day. You need a night’s sleep in between. It is far better to work twelve days for 20 minutes everyday in a passage than to work on that passage for 12 consecutive sessions in a day. (You do not need to believe me. Just try it out!). Instead use the other eleven daily sessions to learn eleven new things. At the end of a week you will be amazed at the fantastic amount that you have learned.

But you must have a plan. You must make sure that everything that you are practicing in these sessions add up to something at the end of a week.

This also means that you do not need to practice 10 –12 hours a day. 20 minutes is plenty. But the amount you will be able to learn in 20 minutes will be 1/12 of what you could learn in 5 hours. Do you understand what I am getting at? Do not think in terms of hours of practice per day, but in terms of number of 20 minute sessions per day and stick to whatever you are doing for seven days (or until you master it - usually less than seven days). bernhard, pianostreet.com

And regarding perfecting the passage, once again I’ll refer to the same great teacher:

Use a timer. Also, there is a law of diminishing returns. As you practice a section you start by making lots of mistakes and learning form your mistakes. This is the exploratory phase. After a while you figure out all the co-ordinates and you pay it perfectly. A lot of beginners stop practicing at this point. This is actually the point where real practice starts: when you finally got it right. Up to now most of your practice will have consisted of wrong repetitions. Now you must ingrain the correct section by repeating it at least as many times as you did it wrong in the exploratory phase. However, after a while of repeating perfect renditions of your passage, due to fatigue (both mental and physical) you will start making mistakes again. It is very important that you stop practicing before getting to this stage. You must stop when your repeats are perfect. But being human, your reaction when you start making mistakes again is to keep repeating to try to re-achieve your former perfection. You will not be able to. In fact all you will achieve is several hours of wrong repetitions. Next day, of course the whole section is a mess even though you may have practiced it for five hours. So make sure that your last repeat is always perfect: this is what will be ingrained in your brain. bernhard, pianostreet.com